Sunday, April 17, 2011

An Easter Meditation

I wrote this piece way back in 2011 and I think it still makes sense, I hope you do too. DS

The other day, a small child, let us call her "Virginia", asked me a pair of searching questions: "where does the Easter Bunny get his Easter eggs?" and "do rabbits lay eggs?".

At a loss as to what to tell her, It occurred to me that the framing of her questions themselves was reminiscent of much of America's present political polemics: a lot of talk avoiding the central question... The Easter Bunny doesn't really exist.... just something invented to sell more stuff.

I would maintain that a huge disinformation industry and a 7 by 24 lobbying and think-tank blitz exists simply to keep Americans from thinking about the salient fact of American life, which is illustrated in the following graph:

So we see that the top one percent of Americans possess 43% of the nation's financial wealth and the bottom 80%, only seven percent of that wealth. This leads to a society which is revealed in the next graph:

So thanks to an enormous effort of the "management of consent" it has been decided that, America being deep in debt and fighting two (three?) wars, cuts are going to have to be made in American's social entitlements, which are the most meager and practically non-existent in the developed world, while it is not "realistic" or even ethical to significantly raise the taxes of that one-percent who owns 43% of the nation's wealth.

The contemporary rationale for oppressing the poor is national debt and deficit, which could otherwise be relieved only by raising taxes on the rich and requiring corporations to bear an equitable share of the national tax burden, which in the Republican party, and a part of the Democratic party today, is unacceptable (and plausibly thought politically suicidal, in view of the current alignment of available political funds and of the legislation governing campaign practice – quite possibly irreversible, since this alignment would seem automatically to disallow reversal). (...) Global war has silenced and numbed America. The national deficit is moral. The people pay in deprivation, indigence, ill-health, insecurity, the humiliation of men and women who cannot find work, support their offspring or properly educate their children in what it should mean to be an American. William Pfaff

It seems obvious to me that if people could think clearly for even a moment, the majority, say 80%, would demand that taxes on the upper one-percent be raised to Scandinavian levels, tax loopholes plugged, offshore tax-havens closed down and defense spending cut to a least only more then the next five countries in the list instead of the next ten, and the money thus raised spent on moving the quality of life in the USA up the second graph to at least the standing of say, Belgium's.

Instead, in the midst of all this mishagoss; just one example of hundreds more: people are being led to discuss Donald Trump as a serious presidential candidate. I would say that a significant portion of the 43% of the nations' wealth that is owned by that one-percent is being spent by them to maintain that sort of level of debate... anything but talking about America's central facts as shown by the two graphs